The increasing demand of portable terminals for wireless communications with improved services forces the development of better block solutions. For instance the reduction of the power consumption of each block becomes of fundamental importance, since it would give some power available for new services. The case of the baseband continuous-time filter in the receiver is here addressed.
Well known filter implementations are the ones based on Active-RC and Active-Gm-RC architectures which guarantee high linearity but with a larger power consumption than with Gm-C filter architecture which, however, suffer from reduced linearity.
In light of the above, there exists a need for a new filter architecture that guarantees high linearity while minimizing power consumption.